If it’s a new year, there must be another dubious plan for expanding gambling down at the legislature. And indeed there is: House Bill 1243, a invitation to the lottery commission to introduce electronic keno games throughout the state.

The bill doesn’t mention electronic keno. Instead, it directs the commission to promulgate rules for “one or more forms” of the game. But House Minority Leader Sal Pace, its sponsor, confirms that electronic keno is what he has in mind.

We’ve opposed previous effects to expand gambling even when we’ve agreed with the motives of the sponsors. Last year, for example, then Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, proposed a ballot measure allowing video keno at restaurants and bars, and video lottery machines at the state fair grounds in Pueblo, with the proceeds going to support higher education. Romer’s revenue-raising method may have been suspect, but we couldn’t quarrel with the need to bolster higher-ed funding.

Unfortunately, HB 1243, sponsored also by Sen. Lois Tochtrop, D-Thornton, fails to get either half of the equation quite right. Not only could the bill result in a wholesale expansion of state-sponsored gambling, but the resulting revenue wouldn’t even go to one of the budget areas widely recognized as needing the most help.

Instead, it would direct 50 percent of the money to the Colorado travel and tourism promotion fund and the other half — and here’s where things get complicated — to a new program providing grants “targeted to offset the costs of, and provide incentives for, the creation or reestablishment in Colorado of manufacturing jobs or primary jobs that would be available in Colorado but for the offshoring of labor to foreign countries.”

To access the new program, a company would supposedly have to prove that it had, or was poised to, offshore jobs but that it would be willing to reverse course and create jobs in Colorado if it received a grant. But would one-time grants really tip the scales in enough cases to boost employment? And how could Colorado verify the claims of applicants without a great deal of bureaucratic overhead?

Pace told us he’s seen plenty of economic development bills over the years that tried to convince companies to move jobs, say, from Ohio or Michigan to Colorado, but that “I wholeheartedly believe that we have to look at competing globally.”

We agree, but even assuming the program worked it would amount to a temporary band-aid that did nothing to alter the economics driving some companies to invest in manufacturing abroad. If a keno game were powerful enough to neutralize the pressures leading to foreign investments, then Congress could get into the act and introduce a game for the entire nation.

When states engage in a form of industrial policy, they usually set themselves up for disappointment. The idea that a short-term infusion of cash will improve a company’s long-term ability to compete in the global marketplace is mostly wishful thinking. Like it or not, eventually those companies still will have to surmount that challenge on their own.